Fruit

The scent which comes from the fruit, and from the spray that is diffused over the green leaves, kindles within us a craving to eat and to drink . . . .
-Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto XXIII


Greetings and wecome to the Un-Zone, the official site of all things Un. It's been a while since the last update. I wouldn't want to deprive all you constant readers your fix of the random thoughts that run through my head put into a semi-coherent form. Lately, the posts have taken the general structure of "This is X, where X is some inanimate object. X is sensual/sexy. Here is the science behind it." Well, I am liking where this is going, so I shall continue on a similar tangent. Or at least find a tangent and write about it. This reminds me of "Connections" on PBS where the host goes from one subject to a wildly different one. An example would be DNA testing to Sherlock Holmes. And in between, you would hit on topics like DNA, Honduras, the Pinkerton Agency, and bananas. So...what will I write about today?

Today' s post is about fruit, in particular, strawberries and peaches. Yes, probably one of the most mundane topics ever. I would have written about Hawaiian shirts, but that just didn't interest me enough today. It will most likely be later this week. Why this topic? Well, I am reminded of what my 12th grade AP English teacher once said during class. We were reading Song of Solomon and everyone was looking bored. To perk up interest, he mentioned that "fruit is sexual." And then he went on for several minutes rambling about English literature and his favorite movie scene from Tom Jones. This scene involves the sensuality of eating, in particular, pears. Though he commented that it would have been better if it involved strawberries.

I've really never thought about this subject that much, well, until about two hours ago. And after musing on this question and going through the reserves of random stuff that I have stored in my head, I have come to the same conclusion. Fruit is sexual. This is based upon four years of a college education, many movies, many books, an afternoon looking at various paintings, some time on the Internet, and some imagination. So, I guess that spending tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper was well worth it.

Let's take the literature view on fruit. If you read the Bible, in particular the Songs of Songs, you will note that certain passages can get quite sensual and most involve fruit. For instance, you have: "Strengthen me with raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love" or "May your breasts be live the clusters of the vine, the fragance of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine." We also have Tom Fielding's Tom Jones with the passage involving the sensuality of eating. They are gazing at each other, feet intertwined, feeding eachother morsels of food, with the juice of ripe pears dripping down their chins.
For fine arts, we have many paintings. Take Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe or Picnic in the Grass, and you will see right by the nude female various ripe fruit she has brought to the picnic. All that is sensuous and arousing are placed in that corner of the painting.
And who can forget multi-ethnic cultural studies. Every culture has foods it considers aphrodisiacs. What better food that fruit? It's ripe, sensuous, fragrant, and tasty. It embodies everything that is considered glorious about the female. Well, at least a lot of the more positive aspects of the female.

And now, the two most sensuous fruits there are. The peach and the strawberry. There is something about these fruits that make them so...so...well...damn. I can't come up with a very good way to describe them in a few words.

The strawberry is the most sensual fruit ever. Even more than bananas. There is nothing better than a perfectly ripe strawberry. Not one of those supermarket copycats that are a poor imitation, but one freshly picked. When at the height of perfection, the strawberry is red, a red that makes lipsticks and lip glosses pale in comparison. And it is red all the way through. The skin is bright and shiny.
The texture...mmm...it should be soft but firm, not hard in the center like most store-bought ones. The best strawberries will have an almost voluptuous mouthfeel when you bite into them. And when you bite into them, your mouth should be filled with juice. It should burst in your mouth. Sweet with a hint of tartness, just enough to make your tongue dance in delight. The experience should bring you close to esctasy. If not, you are just not eating the right strawberries.
But the best part of the strawberry eating experience should be the aroma. The fragrance should knock you out. The Romans called strawberries fraga due to their intense aroma. It is so pleasing that males find it appealing and females find it very feminine. As you can probably guess, I like strawberries.

I like peaches, almost as much as strawberries, but it is a pale second. The Chinese considered the peach to be a symbol of immortality as well as a symbol of ripe sexuality. The skin is silken and fuzzy like human skin. On an unrelated note, this is not sadly so with modern varieties as hybridization has removed this trait. The skin color is red, almost like a blush. The flesh, when fully ripe, is soft and juicy and succulent. When you bite into a peach, it is nearly impossible to stop the rush of sticky, fragrant juices. The juice will run down your chin. It will run down your hand. You must wipe it off or, if you really like them (or you don't care if people look at you), you will lick the juice off your fingers. And the aroma of a ripe peach. It is a heady aroma, one that fills a room. In fact, there are peaches that the French call peche de vigne that will literally fill a room with peach fragrance. They grow in wine vineyards; have flesh that his cream in the center, but turns to a bright red; are very fragile; are never constant when it comes to production and are very expensive. They sell for about $5 each. But when the trees do fruit, it is an interesting experience. Most are used to flavor and color peach ice cream. A tragic use for such good peaches. I digress.

To accurately describe the chemistry and science behind why strawberries and peaches, and for that matter, why fruits are so sensual, would take forever. One could write several books, papers, and other reports on these subjects. So, I will give a very condensed and watered-down version.
Fruits contain several things that make them so tasty. One is flavor compounds. The strawberry has the most flavor compounds, about 300 of them. Two, there are aroma compounds. They have very long and complicated names, but put simply, these give foods their characteristic odors. Fruits have many that are very mouth-watering. Three, fruits contain sugar, the backbone of flavoring in the American diet, in addition to salt and fat. Sugar is a thing we all naturally like. Yup. we've had a sweet tooth for millions of years. Humans supplemented their diet with fruit and our teeth changed. Thank our ancestors for this or we would have just eaten insects and meat.

And so, look at fruit differently. Especially strawberries and peaches. That's all for now.